July 9, 2017

Bi-monthly bipolar political rollercoaster still going

Up a month, down a month, up a month, down a month. By now the pattern I first noticed over a year ago is going like clockwork. See the last report for details of what the peaks and valleys were during the transition and early Trump administration. Early half of an even month is a downer, early half of an odd month is an upper.

That was two months ago, at a peak (firing Comey, House passes healthcare). A month later, we were back in the valley, with the expansion of the witch hunt under Special Counsel Mueller, and the attempted mass murder of GOP Congressmen by a Democrat zealot. A month later, and here we are again near another peak -- an ebb of the witch hunt, CNN taking a massive beating, and a high-profile Reaganesque speech.

Thank God that Trump's first meeting with Putin took place during this relative lull in the witch hunt and Deep State coup.

But as I keep saying, this wheel is going to keep on turning, so don't let the highs cloud your judgment about where things are headed. From the last post:

So rather than the short-term cycles up and down, we should focus on where the longer-term trends are pointing. The foreign policy area has been heading the wrong way ever since Flynn was kicked out. The economic re-development and trade area has been trending the right way ever since the TPP was killed. "Draining the swamp" is a lot more mixed, with the Pentagon and military side of Deep State being much harder to clear out, whereas domestic domains have been easier (DoJ, FBI, etc.).

To pick a timely example, the US and Russia just agreed on a ceasefire in Syria -- good news. But the bad news is that we agreed to a ceasefire last September, and less than two weeks later the Pentagon blew it up by firing on the Syrian Army, killing nearly 100 soldiers, and allowing ISIS to take a key mountain near Deir Ezzor, strengthening their hold on that crucial city.

That doesn't mean the Pentagon will torpedo this ceasefire as well, only that since we're already near a peak, in a few weeks from now we will be heading back down into the depths. And since foreign affairs is the one area where things have become worse than they were under Obama, it would not be surprising if an unraveling of the ceasefire is part of the next slump in the bipolar cycle.

The Special Counsel has been hiring more Democrat fixers (Preet Bharara, protector of Wall Street white collar criminals [correction: it's Bharara's corruption chief, Andrew Goldstein, who is on the team]), showing that he's just lying low or working behind the scenes for now. In the next several weeks, the witch hunt will flare up again. Attorney General Sessions has still not rescinded his recusal, so the conditions are still such that the Special Counsel can do whatever he wants to whoever he wants in the witch hunt.

The brass who manage the Pentagon remaining opposed to co-operation with Russia and in favor of regime change in Syria -- that's a constant. The Deep State holding some kind of leverage over Sessions to keep him from protecting Trump -- that's a constant. These toxic background conditions mean that bad things can strike the Trump movement in the future, even the near future, and we cannot upgrade the status of our prospects until those background conditions are no longer toxic.

We are all in for the fight of our lives, and we can't get lazy and start gloating just because we had an endorphin rush of a month -- next month we won't be gloating so easily. There is no place for triumphalism while we are still in battle mode. Until we have totally vanquished the enemy, we must remain stoic -- not letting the highs go to our head, and not letting the lows sap our motivation to keep pushing.

After winning the election, only one of those phenomena has really taken off -- the premature triumphalism. The "all is doomed" mindset was actually far more widespread during the campaign season.

A reality check should have made people behave the opposite way -- being sanguine about the chances of a populist and nationalist candidate winning in the arena of voter persuasion, when voters had grown tired of elitism and globalism; and being guarded about the prospects for a President who came into the arena of the DC Swamp with political debt, rather than political capital, to impose the will of the people on the Pentagon, the Deep State, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc., as though these major power groups give a damn about who won with the voters.